Connecting Metabase to ClickHouse

To connect to ClickHouse with HTTP(S) you need this information:

The details for your ClickHouse Cloud service are available in the ClickHouse Cloud console. Select a service and click Connect:

Choose HTTPS. Connection details are displayed in an example curl command.

If you’re using self-managed ClickHouse, the connection details are set by your ClickHouse administrator.

1. If you don’t have a plugins folder, create one as a subfolder of where you have metabase.jar saved.

2. The plugin is a JAR file named clickhouse.metabase-driver.jar. Download the latest version of the JAR file at https://github.com/clickhouse/metabase-clickhouse-driver/releases/latest

3. Save clickhouse.metabase-driver.jar in your plugins folder.

4. Start (or restart) Metabase so that the driver gets loaded properly.

5. Access Metabase at http://hostname:3000. On the initial startup, you will see a welcome screen and have to work your way through a list of questions. If prompted to select a database, select “I’ll add my data later”:

1. Click on the gear icon in the top-right corner and select Admin Settings to visit your Metabase admin page.

2. Click on Add a database. Alternately, you can click on the Databases tab and select the Add database button.

3. If your driver installation worked, you will see ClickHouse in the dropdown menu for Database type:

   

4. Give your database a Display name, which is a Metabase setting - so use any name you like.

5. Enter the connection details of your ClickHouse database. Enable a secure connection if your ClickHouse server is configured to use SSL. For example:

   

6. Click the Save button and Metabase will scan your database for tables.

1. Exit the Admin settings by clicking the Exit admin button in the top-right corner.

2. In the top-right corner, click the + New menu and notice you can ask questions, run SQL queries, and build a dashboard:

   

3. For example, here is a SQL query run on a table named uk_price_paid that returns the average price paid by year from 1995 to 2022:

   

1. Click on + New and select Question. Notice you can build a question by starting with a database and table. For example, the following question is being asked of a table named uk_price_paid in the default database. Here is a simple question that calculates the average price by town, within the county of Greater Manchester:

   

2. Click the Visualize button to see the results in a tabular view.

   

3. Below the results, click the Visualization button to change the visualization to a bar chart (or any of the other options available):